making it for no one

A few years ago I stopped making music, and I never really said why. This is me working it out.

the loop

The plain version is that I’m a perfectionist, and there are times I find it hard to finish things. When what I’m making falls short of the track I’m holding it up against, I lose the will to keep going. Finishing a piece start to end is rare for me. I make a loop that sounds good and then I stop there — the loop becomes the whole song, and the song never comes.

For a while I told myself it was a tools problem, or a skill problem. I switched from FL Studio to Ableton Live hoping the newness would carry me, and all I got was a harder program and the same unfinished loops. I’d sit down to write and end up just playing with sound. I still can’t fully tell whether that’s a slump or just not being good enough yet.

the part i don’t say

But there’s a part underneath that I think matters more. When I first started, I finished a few tracks and put them out, and they landed more than I expected: someone I knew told me I had talent; strangers messaged to say they were fans, or that we should make something together; some even got played out by DJs at underground clubs, and watching the floor move stuck with me.

That should have felt good, and some of it did. But mostly it became pressure. I didn’t believe my own work: I knew the tracks leaned hard on their references, and I was sure I couldn’t make anything that good again — those few only existed because I’d obsessed over every detail, and partly because some combinations of sounds happened to fall into place by chance, and I couldn’t see myself summoning either again on demand. So when people showed up expecting more, the gap between what they thought I was and what I thought I was got unbearable. I didn’t collaborate with any of them. I just went quiet and stopped.

not finishing isn’t only a personality trait. for me it’s also a way of not being seen before i’m ready.

Looking back, a lot of that self-assessment was probably wrong. Every track ever made leans on the ones before it; influence is how music has always moved, woven into the culture itself, not a flaw that was particular to mine. “it’s just imitation, I got lucky” is the kind of story you tell yourself to explain away anything good. But true or not, the fear was real, and quitting was the thing that made it stop.

finishing is not publishing

It’s been two or three years. The want is coming back, and something I’d only half-known for a while is slowly hardening into conviction: I’d fused two things that aren’t the same — finishing something and showing it to people. I’d treated every track as if the moment I called it done it would be judged, so the safest way to never be judged was to never call anything done.

So the plan is to pull them apart. The first stretch — half a year, maybe a year — is for making things nobody’s meant to hear yet. No release, no audience, no old name to live up to. Just finishing, over and over, in private, until finishing stops being the scary part. The point isn’t the tracks. It’s getting used to the act of completing something with nobody watching.

The other half is scope. I get stuck inside a single decision — should I learn to build the exact sound in my head, or should I just take sounds that exist and bend them — and I’ll turn it over for so long that nothing moves at all. Picking one on purpose and starting beats picking the right one. And small forms help for the same reason: a one-minute piece finishes before the doubt can catch up.

for no one, for now

The music I want to make sits at one intersection — harmony influenced by classical Romanticism but pushed toward the sacred, drums built from off-beats and polyrhythm, and a dark, ritual texture. That’s what I want to get back to making.

What I want out of this isn’t an audience. It’s to be able to make the thing I want to make without minding whether anyone’s watching — which is, I think, the exact thing I lost the first time. When something’s done, maybe I’ll quietly slip it into the playlist on this site — nothing announced, no release, just sitting there for my own satisfaction, and for whoever happens to press play.

So for now I’m making it for no one. That’s not the sad version. It’s the only way I know to get the want back.